30 Women, 30 Careers: Celebrating Diversity
Career — Fashion Designer
My first full-scale figure, and the first armature I have ever built — a fashion designer standing two metres tall, her garment moving around her like a wave.
A fashion designer works in the space between imagination and the body. She begins with an idea — a mood, a material, a silhouette — and has to find a way to carry it onto a living figure that moves, breathes and stands in front of other people.
Haute couture takes that further again. It is fashion made as an art form rather than as clothing: garments that are built, sculpted and constructed, where the making matters as much as the wearing.
The design sketchDeveloped after the head was formed, working through the coral collar, earrings and flowing garment before these elements were developed further in clay.
This sculpture is about the garment as much as the woman. Rather than dressing the figure in something flat and still, I wanted the garment to move around her like a wave — lifting, folding and travelling across the body, so the cloth reads as something alive rather than something worn.
The sea runs through the whole piece. Coral grows through her hair and then carries on down onto the garment, so the ocean is not an accessory placed on top of her but something that has grown into the design itself. She will finally stand on rocks, as though she has come out of the water and up onto the shore.
The figure standing on the armatureAt two metres it is the largest piece I have made.
Her face is turned into profile rather than looking straight out at the viewer. She is not presenting herself. She is looking at something, or thinking about something, the way a designer does when she is still working an idea out.
She holds herself with a quiet confidence. The scale gives her presence, but the gesture is calm — a woman standing inside her own work, comfortable in it.
The garment is treated as a wave. It wraps and lifts around the figure so that the movement of cloth becomes the movement of water, and the line of the dress does the same work a wave does — carrying the eye around and along the body.
Coral runs through her hair and then continues down onto the garment. Each piece is pierced with hundreds of small holes, which gives the mass its lightness — from a distance it reads as texture, and close up as structure.
The coral built separately before it was worked into the hair.
Two small gold fish sit in her hair, with more to be added. They are the smallest elements in the piece and the only bright ones, and they give the eye somewhere to settle within all that texture.
Gold filigree earrings hang at each ear — a designer’s own finishing touch, and a reminder that this is a woman who thinks about detail for a living.
The finished figure will stand on rocks rather than on a plain base, so that the setting becomes part of the sculpture and places her at the edge of the water.
This is the first armature I have ever built. Everything before it has been small enough to hold, and a two-metre figure needs a frame to stand on: a galvanised pipe structure that the clay is built up around and strapped to while it is still soft.
Shown with a person for scale, revealing the physical presence and life-sized proportions of the work.
Left: the upper torso that survived. Right: the figure back on the armature after the rebuild, with the shoulder still open.
The first attempt at building the figure collapsed. It is the sort of thing that happens at this scale, and there was nothing to do but look at what was left and start again.
The head had not been attached at that point, so it survived untouched. Much of the upper torso was sound enough to keep. The legs had to be rebuilt from the beginning.
The arms have not been developed yet. They are the next stage, and the shoulder is deliberately still open so that they can be worked properly into the body rather than added onto it.
Finished — fired & glazed
This piece is awaiting its bisque and glaze firing. Finished photographs will be added here once it comes out of the kiln.
For enquiries about pricing or to commission a piece, please contact lee.anchor@optusnet.com.au.